Free article: Mobile operators must develop new enterprise pricing models

Revenue opportunities from enterprise mobility could not come at a better time for the mobile industry, which has to contend with saturating mobile penetration, intense pressure on voice margins and disappointing take-up of consumer non-voice services. New revenue opportunities from enterprise mobility are a tantalising prospect, but will require radical changes – including new pricing models. Many enterprises are deterred from adopting mobility solutions because of fears that telecoms costs will increase rapidly and they will be unable to control their expenditure.

Enterprises need help to control their telecoms costs

Enterprises are already concerned that spending on mobile services is too high and out of control; for example, anxieties about high roaming charges have been well publicised. Some mobility expenses are not even tracked – for example, WLAN access charges at a hotel or conference venue might be claimed as business expenses rather than accounted for as telecoms costs. Enterprises need an end-to-end solution that helps them to control and reduce costs.

Effective control and minimisation of telecoms expenditure has major repercussions for mobile operators’ pricing models and billing systems. All of the following features may be needed to create appealing enterprise mobility solutions.

• 'Uncapped' tariffs. Tariffs that define a fixed cost for unlimited use of one or more services would make it easier for enterprises to plan and keep to their budgets.
• Group tariffs. Bundles of services and usage allocations that a group of (or all) company employees can share might be more flexible and economical than individual tariffs.
• Transparent pricing. Operators should make it easy for users to compare their usage of a service – for example, in terms of time, number of Web pages viewed, or number of emails downloaded – with the volume of data that was consumed and, ultimately, the cost of that usage. Hidden costs should be avoided. For example, signalling ‘handshakes’ may result in high costs if a mobile operator charges for them individually, but users may be completely unaware that they are incurring these charges.
• Low roaming charges. Employees can easily run up very large mobile phone bills while travelling abroad, and many enterprises are dissatisfied with high roaming charges.
• Call control. Some enterprises may want to perform their own call control and become involved in carrier signalling to achieve the least-expensive routeing of calls.
• Monitoring and control of service usage. Enterprises may want the ability to monitor usage and costs incurred by individual users and services, perhaps in real time. They may also need to control users’ access to services, to allocate usage or cost limits for individual users or services, and to send warnings to individuals that they should moderate their usage.
• Tariff flexibility. Enterprises may want the flexibility to select the most appropriate billing plans for individual employees, or groups of employees, and to change these when necessary.

Pricing is just one area where mobile operators need to depart from their consumer-focused approach in order to be successful in the enterprise market. Thereport Seizing the Opportunities from Enterprise Mobility considers many other enterprise requirements and identifies the actions that mobile operators need to take to increase enterprise revenue and defend themselves against competition from enterprise mobility solutions based on WLAN.